Dragon Ball Kai: The Freezer Arc(s)

Earlier I mentioned how DBZ doesn't measure up to Avatar: The Last Airbender. Well I would not hesitate to put Dragon Ball Kai right up there next to ATLA. Kai may not have the philosophical strengths of ATLA, but at long last it has a solid story, and it boasts the most supreme fighting you'll ever find. For years I've struggled over where to place DBZ, but I don't need to struggle anymore because Kai is as good as Z was supposed to be -- y'know, in my head, as the kid who worshipped the show on principle. That illusion of how good Dragon Ball Z was supposed to be, is how good Dragon Ball Kai actually is.

Dragon Ball Kai continues to earn my unmitigated esteem as I powerhouse through the series. While I consider the Saiyan arc to be the best part of Z and by extension Kai, because it is the best-written portion of the story, I find myself giddily enjoying the Namek and Freezer arcs (Z seasons 2 and 3, Kai episodes 17-52.) even more than what preceded it.

While there were one or two small things cut out of the Saiyan arc that I felt they could have included, there wasn't really a single removal which popped out at me as something with any reason at all to be kept in Kai's version of the Namek/Freezer arcs. They even included two of my favorite scenes which I expected not to see: scenes which don't further the plot much but which show Goku's emotional fatigue against the impenetrable power of Freezer. In the first, Goku imagines Freezer killing Chichi and destroying Earth. In the second, he hallucinates Vegeta's voice only to then realize that Vegeta is dead. Two beautiful, powerful little scenes that they had the good sense to keep, while cutting 6 idiotic episodes of space travel (how the fuck did the aliens know what Namek was going to look like anyway??), Goku fighting a star, countless scenes of Bulma putzing around on Namek for no good reason (get a job!), AND MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL: 10,000 minutes of people standing around staring at each other or powering up.

The battle against Freezer is quite probably the single most spectacular achievement in the history of action TV fights: a truly non-stop uphill fight against ultimate power that surely must outlast any other continuous battle on TV. Unfortunately, the endless stalling and filler in Z makes the fight drag on to the point when you wish it would just end already. I sincerely found myself forgetting that DBZ really had much fighting in it at all!

But with the stalling, replays, and filler removed, the Freezer fight becomes fucking exhilarating, truly bombastic. Goku fights Freezer for 5 straight episodes before going SSJ, and that means... five straight episodes of pure non-stop action! It was unfathomable! I wouldn't have thought something like this was possible.

The only part in Kai I didn't quite go gaga over was that one little segment, originally episode 94 of Dragon Ball Z. Why? because that's the part where Anime Labs and/or "Random Comicon Retailer #124" decided to start their Freezer Saga. Nobody on Earth will ever know why they started their Freezer Saga 92% of the way into Freezer's actual arc, 1 and 2/3rds of a season past when Freezer first appears and with 90% of the battle against Freezer already accomplished. But they did, and it was glorious, and I'll go to my grave with that episode as one of my fondest, most impenetrable, and by far most astoundingly impressive childhood memories. Burned spectacularly onto my retina, it was the most exotic thing I had ever seen, and I've probably watched it more than anything else in my entire life. So I know each frame pretty much by heart, and no matter what Kai was going to do with it, I was never going to be okay with any changes.

But other than that, to describe Dragon Ball Kai as glorious doesn't do it justice. As much as I dislike the rest of Z after Goku kills Freezer on Namek (don't even get me started! In my world Mecha Freezer, Trunks, and good-guy Vegeta will never exist!!) I'm definitely going to watch the Android & Cell sagas now... in fact, I'd be half way through them already if this damned snow storm didn't delay my package! And The Buu saga is also being done in Kai. The show was cancelled in Japan but it is being made for foreign markets, so that'll be good. I dislike Buu even more than Cell but I'll watch that saga too. You know why? 'Cause Kai is fucking amazing.